A Morally Gray War in Ukraine?

The world has now begun a second month of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. If one thing has proven to be surprising, it is the resistance and unification of the Ukrainian people to fight back against Russian soldiers. Even after an entire month, the Russian occupation has been shaky and slow in comparison to previous expectations. Recently, civilian offensives have pushed back some Russian lines as the battles near Kyiv, the capital city, are still lingering. Russia’s main excuse for its invasion is the injection of NATO (The North Atlantic Treaty Organization) into Eastern Europe and previously Soviet-controlled territory. A somewhat equivalent example would be if China asked Mexico to join the Chinese Communist Alliance. Obviously, that would make us worried, just as Russia was worried that Ukraine would join. However, does that warrant an invasion of a free country? Well for Vladimir Putin, it does. He knows that the world will do nothing to actually try and stop the invasion, which is exactly what happened. The threat of nuclear weapons makes any confrontation whatsoever nearly impossible, so much so that a deal to ship Polish fighter jets to Ukraine was struck down because neither the U.S. nor Poland wanted to actually transfer the jets to Ukraine, fearing a Russian response. If anything, Putin’s total disregard for human life and international law makes the threat of nuclear war even more concerning; if anyone would do it, it’d be him.

What’s even more interesting is Russia’s defense that they’re invading Ukraine in order to stop their nazi ridden military. Despite the obviously shoddy excuse for an entire invasion, they’re technically not wrong. The Azov Battalion, one of the National Guard units of Ukraine, has strong ties to far-right and neo-nazi ideologies. However, they’re as united as we are in fighting against Russia and resisting the invasion. So is the enemy of our enemy one of our friends? Is it worth fighting alongside neo-nazis in order to stop the bombing of hospitals and shelters? This unique moral decision-making is exactly what gives war its controversial stance while it happens. Sure, it’s easy to look back and say that the Nazis were the bad guys and we were the “good” guys who decided to drop 2 nuclear bombs that killed a quarter of a million people and locked hundreds of thousands of Japanese-American citizens in internment camps. Was all that worth the win against the Nazis? Will we justify our actions in this war differently in the future? Only time will tell, but an answer we can give confidently is that the war in Ukraine has certainly proven to be an intensely morally gray situation.